On the Subject of Warhammer

Doutzen Kroes

I happened to get into the latter stages of the closed beta, and the preview weekend or whatever it's being called is currently under way, and so far I have mixed feelings about Warhammer. Mostly a mixture of different negative feelings, it has to be said.

Firstly, I loath the art style. The cartoony WoW thing leaves me absolutely cold. It's even more pronounced, and therefore bad, in Warhammer than it was in LotRO. I will say that it at least seems to be consistent, but overall it's not a world in which I wish to spend time. Personally I'm much more for a realistic style like AoC, although I'd prefer a proper, seamless Vanguard-style world. I'm not even sure if Warhammer's world is seamless, I haven't spent enough time in it to reach any sort of zone junction.
At least in Warhammer they've attempted to "sex up" the female characters. Well, the evil ones anyway. Although it's difficult to be titillated by a sexed-up cartoon character. But it leads to perhaps the most impressive aspect of WAR's design philosophy, which is that there's a big emphasis on making the player characters look cool. That is something AoC could really learn from since at level 56 (yes, still), my Priestess looks little different to how she looked at level 5, which is to say scruffy and poor. It's a well-known fact that the NPCs in Conan have the best-looking armour.

Technically WAR falls squarely into the "simple graphics to run on as many computers as possible" camp. While a strong art direction (even if it's one I don't like) can overcome a lot of technical limitations, the WAR world still looks like a 5-year-old toy town. And while the zealots might claim the graphical options are currently limited prior to release, a shitty model with high-res textures is still a shitty model. None of the screens I've seen, even those which are supposed to represent the full-on splendour of the release game, look even remotely impressive. They're certainly a long way behind AoC, irrespective of game play differences.

Speaking of game play, well WAR is unashamedly a PvP game so it's a bit pointless to criticise it for that. However, some self-confessed PvP fans still attempt to claim that the game also has compelling PvE, and that's where I disagree. From what I've seen of it, the PvE is unutterably tedious and repetitive. It's not really surprising, because it's not the focus of the game. One exception is the inclusion of "public quests" which are just little, global scenarios that you can take part in, or not, as you wish. You don't even have to group, although it was quite common for ad-hoc groups to form during the quests just to making healing and focus a bit easier. I will say that the public quests were definitely the highlight of my time in WAR. Although after 2 or 3 repetitions of a given quest it starts to feel a little meaningless.
As an interesting aside, from what I know of Guild Wars 2 it sounds like that will feature similar "shared" world-event scenarios, and I look forward to seeing how that works out because I'm much more likely to want to play GW2 than I currently am WAR.

I did do a PvP "mission", and it was predictably chaotic and dull. Like a PvP version of public quests, only less fun. The thing is, while AoC gets a lot of (deserved) criticism for lack of content, WAR will probably get away with it because, as I've said before, in a PvP game the players are the content. As long as there's somewhere you can go and take part in a battle, who cares if there aren't enough quests to make PvE self-sufficient?

On the subject of criticism, it turns out Mythic won't be running official forums. I wonder why. Well, I don't really, it's obviously because they've seen what a shower of shit the forums became for both AoC and Vanguard before it. It can't be nice for the developers to see their own forums full of bitching and complaints and often just plain insults. It does, however, mean that there will be no concentrated focus point for all the inevitable whining about class balance and exploits and bugs and hacks that will undoubtedly plague WAR. That might dilute the vitriol to the point where it appears as if WAR is simply a better game than those which allow the unwashed masses to have their say on an official forum. It doesn't mean those issues won't exist. The downside to a PvP game is really the people it attracts. Hacks and exploits are always more common in a game that promotes competition between players, even if they're not exactly unheard of in PvE either. But more than that, the PvP population includes some of the whiniest, most clueless, self-obsessed little bitches in all of MMO-dom. Just have a look at the AoC forums, and check out how many of the loudest complainers, the most self-righteous quitters, the most aggressive and nasty and illiterate posters come from PvP servers. It's the vast majority.

And that is the single reason I hope WAR turns out to be a big success, because it will suck up all those worthless, wretched, vacuous little shits and give games like AoC some room to breathe.

Thought for the Day - Gemma Atkinson

An extended Thought for the Day, straight from the "where are they now?" file. And by "they", I mean her lovely jubblies, naturally.

Conan Watch #5

Nadine Velazquez

Still hanging in there, maintaining my traditionally slow and steady advance through the mid levels of the game. Pinged a whopping 56 today, but I'm starting to hit the content gaps that people have been whining about for months already.

Level 50 basically means advancing to the Eiglophian Mountains, but while arriving in previous hubs has meant a quest log chock-full of XP-tastic quests, they've turned out to be a bit thin on the ground here. In the lower valley you get the usual run-of-the-mill kill quests, fighting cannibals in the 51-52 range. So far so good. There are "Wanted Posters", essentially repeatable bounty hunts which are the same as Vanguard's "Missives", but which give a pitiful XP reward. It's not long until you run out of quests in the lower valley, and head up the hill. The odd thing is, the mobs suddenly jump to the 54-57 range, and then further up still they're 58-60+. It would be nice if there was more to do in the lower valley, to at least get you up to speed with the next section. Having to beat mobs and especially bosses with their associated adds 5+ levels above you gets old fast. And then when you're done with those mobs, you're still several levels short of the next destiny quest (60), and the subsequent hubs.

Adding new zones to provide extra content is, of course, a substantial undertaking. What's odd about the mountains is that while an alternative 50+ zone would be nice it wouldn't hurt to simply add a few more quest lines within the existing zone.

So now I'm at 56, the next quest in my log is to beat a 60 boss within a camp of level 60 Vanir, which is just slightly beyond what my poor Priestess is capable of. At least solo. But then if I coasted through it in a group, what next? I'd still be a few levels down on where I need to be to progress to the next zone.

Even before I hit the mountains, and after the relatively good Field of the Dead, I made a new Guardian to pass the time. She had a pretty fun time in Tortage, although it wasn't particularly exciting the second time round. I miss the multiple, varied starting zones Vanguard offers. Unfortunately I'm not that keen on the Guardian class itself, at least not so far. It seems strange that the primary tank class in the game has absolutely no self-heals or buffs so far. Naturally they can take a lot more punishment than a clothy healer, but it's all a bit one-way. No heals, not great DPS, it's all about getting and holding aggro which is fair enough, but in a game which is fairly solo-oriented before end-game it doesn't feel like a particularly rounded class. While I wish the Priest of Mitra was a better healer, the fact is it works pretty well as a solo class.

Anyway if I can't be bothered to push through the final stages of the mountains, I might head back to Conall's with the Guardian and see how it develops.

On the Subject of Criticism

Bianca Beauchamp

It's got to the point where people seem to fall over themselves in their attempts to appear dismissive and nonchalant when it comes to games these days. Every "new" game seems to trigger the same torrent of bandwagon-jumping yahoos attempting to impress each other with how "game X was much better, back in the day, but you wouldn't know about that because you're not as old-school as me".

It also seems like some noob has just discovered The Escapist, because there's been an avalanche of references to it recently, and to "Yahtzee" Croshaw's Zero Punctuation reviews in particular.
I haven't bothered to read many of The Escapists reviews and articles, mostly because the few I have read have been uniformly tired and derivative and written in the same stuck-up tone, where reviewers will refuse to acknowledge any positive aspect of any game that dares to offend their delicate, mature sensibilities with regard to it's themes, misogyny in particular. "Oh no, this female NPC has visible cleavage, this game is worthless and must never be played by anyone".

The Zero Punctuation reviews aren't so much in keeping with the overall tone of the site, rather it just seems to be hosted there as a cynical attempt by the site's management to score some traffic. Which isn't to say they're any better of course. They're relatively amusing the first couple of times you see them, in a sort of "hur hur hur he's speaking quickly and making lots of sarcastic comments and swearing hur hur" way. The problem is, besides having a fucking stupid nickname, his reviews are an absolute one-trick pony. Hilariously tearing something apart when it's quite obvious it's a genre in which he never had any interest to start with, at high speed so as not to bore the ADD kiddies and also to disguise the fact that his hilarious analogies are little more than a very weak Charlie Brooker imitation. And the fact that he's notorious for only ever liking Portal. I mean, fucking Portal? Yeah, that was fun for 5 minutes but even then the hilarious "black humour" was starting to wear thin. It's obvious he's someone who should stick to cerebral games like sudoku or crosswords or online IQ tests, and leave childish video games to people who might actually enjoy them.

And no, I haven't missed the irony of criticising someone who's only job seems to be to criticise things.

In AoC's case the bashing obviously has a lot to do with people who claimed the game would be revolutionary and effectively make every other MMO redundant, only to find themselves playing just another fantasy MMO. Those people now feel foolish, they feel betrayed, and they take it out on the game. And then they make the exact same mistake with Warhammer. It almost defies belief that these people could be so fucking short-sighted, but when the wrath of the disillusioned migrates from AoC's forums to WAR's, just as it migrated from Vanguard to AoC, the cycle will inevitably repeat once again. I almost feel sorry for WAR's developers because the shit-storm is approaching and there's nothing they can do to stop it.

For the record, right now I'm looking forward to Far Cry 2. The environments look impressively large and free, much more so than those in Crysis even they're not quite as richly rendered. The gameplay looks fairly standard, just an FPS with a few gimmicks like the flame-thrower and some faction nonsense bolted on. Naturally I have to be wary of the fact it's also being released on the 360 and PoS3, so look forward to big, chunky GUIs, slow-motion AI that gives you a chance to get a bite to eat while you're waiting for your character to turn using a gamepad's analogue stick, and extensive narrative hand-holding. The graphics are looking pretty sweet, though, and if it'll run on a console there's hope for it being fairly undemanding on a PC. Not that that will prevent an eruption of hate on forums around the world complaining that some idiot's five-year-old box won't run it at max detail on their 30" monitor. Or that the widescreen implentation is wrong, or that the online activation is intrusive and evil and the game should be boycotted at all costs as a result.

Ultimately, being tragically critical of everything is just the forum idiot's way of attempting to garner respect from his peers by claiming to have so much experience in gaming that they're in some sort of special, unique position to judge. The most common trick is to reference other games that the reader may not have played, either because the games are old or alternatively because they're not yet released and therefore only available to people "special" enough to be in the beta. By claiming that those games are superior, the author will attempt the double-whammy of both demeaning the game in question, and also belittling the other readers.
It's a worthless tactic, because in fact no one gives a shit whether the author lives or dies, let alone what beta they happen to be in. But it's becoming increasingly common to the point of ubiquity, regardless of game genre.

Perhaps optimism will become so rare that it will suddenly emerge as the new, cool outlook for people who have the nerve to break from the herd, and we'll see forums starting to spawn posts by people who aren't afraid to enjoy games for a change.

Thought for the Day - Busty Alli

All this talk about "mature content" can only mean one thing - Thought for the Day! Featuring the ever so lovely "Busty Alli". Read it and weep, Funcom.